ESP support for Web Services

I’m really excited about the addition of Web Services support to ESP and the possibilities this opens up in terms of ease of integration with other systems. In case you missed the news, ESP 5.1 SP02 was released last week, and the most notable features in this release are support for Web Services as well as an SAP RFC input/output adapter for integrating ESP with SAP applications.

But right now I want to focus on the Web Services support, which is very versatile and I think will be useful in many different situations. This new web services support (limited to SOAP right now, but we plan to add REST support in the not-too-distant future) delivers three new integration capabilities:

it allows ESP projects to appear as web services, ready to receive events from web service client applications in real-time

there is also a web service client input adapter that acts as a web service client and can call a web service to request information that is then sent into ESP via an input stream or input window. This adapter can be set up to reguarly poll a web service to obtain any new events.

and last but certainly not least, is the web service output adapter that will call a web service to deliver output events from ESP. This is a real-time event-driven information flow – i.e. events will be delivered as soon as they are published by ESP

One example of where this can be used: ESP can post events to SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration via the NetWeaver Web Services interface. Some of you may have seen our “Tower Monitoring” demo which used a pre-release version of this adapter. When it detects that equipment on a transmission tower is overheating, it automatically opens a repair ticket by posting an event to Process Orchestration.

So have a look. You can download SP2 today right here in the ESP Developer Center under a trial license – or existing customers can download it from SAP Service Marketplace or the Sybase EBF/Maintenance site.